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Google Glass: is it a threat to our privacy?

March 6, 2013

Of course, the ben­e­fits wouldn’t accrue to the wearer. Google would sell the data (suit­ably anonymised, of course). And your smart­phone already pro­vides a huge amount of detail about you. Song Chaoming, a researcher at North­eastern Uni­ver­sity in Boston, has been analysing mobile phone records (including which base sta­tions the phone con­nects to) and has devel­oped an algo­rithm that can pre­dict – with, he says, 93% accu­racy – where its owner is at any time of the day (by tri­an­gu­lating from the strengths of the base sta­tion sig­nals; that’s part of how your smart­phone is able to show where you are on an onscreen map). He analysed the records of 50,000 people; the accu­racy was never below 80%.

When you con­sider that Chaoming was only doing this in his spare time, and that Google has teams of people whose only task is to develop better algo­rithms to work out where a phone’s owner is, and what they’re going to do based on their past activity and searches, you realise that if you’re using an Android phone, Google prob­ably knows what you’re going to do before you do.

The true number is likely to be some­where between these two fig­ures according to Jack Levin of the Brud­nick Centre on Vio­lence and Con­flict at North­eastern Uni­ver­sity. Mr Levin distinguishes […]

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